I was pleased and honored to participate earlier this week at Forum 2014, Virginia’s Department of General Services’ big event for state and local procurement professionals and supplier partners. Indeed it is a very large event, taking place at the Hampton Roads Convention Center over four days, featuring more than 80 sessions, anchored by more than

Well no, but it does make for entertaining, and in a way, thought-provoking television. Showtime’s popular dark comedy, House of Lies, is described as a “subversive, scathing look at a self-loathing management consultant from a top-tier firm.” Marty Kaan (as portrayed by Don Cheadle) and his MBA colleagues at Kaan & Associates charm unsuspecting corporate

As most CIOs continue to struggle with growing Data Analytics requirements and the abject shortage of Data Scientists, there is certain value to exploring external sourcing in the area. This assertion is based on the dual premises of availability of highly-skilled personnel in popular outsourcing destinations such as India along with niche expertise and products available from highly specialized service providers across the globe.

Multi-vendor sourcing through breakup of service components has become the new norm for IT services sourcing but requires care in Governance, Service-Integration and the inclusion of addendum clauses for contractual liability assignment and risk-mitigation

Assignment of liability can be quiet a complicated exercise, since services are both interlinked & interdependent and instating a working governance structure may be complicated at best and requires careful consideration and constant updating.

The so called ‘Digital disruption’ has forced enterprises worldwide, to take a fresh view of how they do business, compete and engage with customers. It has thrown up a myriad of opportunities and challenges that every business, irrespective of scale or nature, must address in order to successfully compete in an environment that is rapidly evolving. The past 5 - 6 years have seen key changes in the global business environment marked by a recession that gripped the US, Europe and Asia as a result of the financial meltdown coupled with permeation of new technology like the Cloud, Big Data Analytics and trends such as Social Media and Enterprise Mobility.

Superstition, despite our age of science and technology, plays a prevalent role in our day to day life, and it can be seen everywhere from the big time to the backyard. It is a belief founded by someone, no matter how evident, it is irrational, and always relies on chance. No matter what meaning superstition may bring to people in general, to the players in the cricket field as in the world-cup this time, it is a sense of duty, a feeling of comfort they receive from a certain superstition. The propitiation of the right gods, ritual dances before the hunt, can all be viewed as efforts, no matter how faint or unavailing, to control destiny.

Not so long ago in the collective historical memory of the world's cartographers and sea-faring journey men, Columbus set out to find the land of spices and untold riches. A few hundred years in the life of our civilisation is hardly a blimp, a batting of an eyelid, a heartbeat, really. What the fabled land of abundance and ancient wisdom offered visiting pioneers of the new worlds of the Europe and America was everything from silks to spices to spirituality..

Gains from IT sourcing strategy should be expected to be naturally aligned with a degree of corporate risk and the management of these via a corporate retained governance layer specifically at times where multi-supplier or multi-sourcing for competitive advantage, performance-enhancement and reduction in operating costs, is increasingly attractive an option in post-recession-hungry-for-more-times. Such supplier-management governance layers have an inherent cost and value built-in which could ideally stop at the service management integration layer where platforms, process, infrastructure, communications and people capabilities from the supplier-stratosphere are best left to deliver the value they are contracted for. The retained-governance layer provides the key ingredients of service management which on the one hand, underwrite the service delivery for the internal or end-customers, and on the other, manage the supplier relationship to ensure the expected value from the outsourcing contract is assured. Customers who invest in this aspect clearly ascribe the required focus to the decision and will most likely therefore, follow a meticulous review and reporting mechanism which yet again ensures the strategy is always on the radar, visible.

We’ve all done our fair share of brainstorming, but have you ever engaged in a robust round of “blamestorming”?

Believe it or not there is an art to blamestorming and it’s not what you might think it is, and also not exactly how it’s defined in, for instance, the Urban Dictionary: “Sitting around in a group, discussing why a deadline was missed or a project failed, and identifying a scapegoat.”

A recent blog from marketing guru Seth Godin talks about that beautiful pair of shoes—and on sale at a great price!—only there’s one catch: they are one size too small.

There’s a decision to be made: should you opt for the good looking bargain and go with sore feet until maybe the shoes stretch out? And if they don’t stretch out enough do you just grin and bear a sore foot fit? Or maybe just walk away?